FreeBSD 6.4 Released

hmallett writes "FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE, the fifth release from the 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, is now available. In addition to being hosted at many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."

Comments

Wow, tells you about the popularity

[ByOhTek]

I can't remember (and am too lazy to look at the timestamps on the website), but the ISOs were out the day before or after Thanksgiving (US). Pretty sure it was the day before.

I think it's only a month or two behind schedule, that's not bad for the FreeBSD team. Then again, they make a good product, between their releases being on time, and their releases being their usual high quality, I'm glad to have the high quality instead.

Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity

[TheRaven64]

No one really cares about 6.4. The people who really, really, care about stability might decide to run 6.4, but most of the stability-conscious people will just run 6-STABLE and not care about releases. The people who want new features are running 7.0 or 7-STABLE and are waiting for 7.1. The people on the cutting edge are running 8-CURRENT.

Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity

[Ded Bob]

Actually, stability-conscious people will be running either RELENG_6_4 or RELENG_7_1 (once 7.1 is complete). You may call them the super-stability-conscious people. :) -STABLE branches just refer to the ABI being stable, but they are still development branches. They do tend to be more stable then CURRENT since the code must survive CURRENT for an amount of time before being merged into STABLE.

Personally, I run 7-STABLE (RELENG_7) on all my systems with HEAD in a VM or two.

Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity

[Drinking Bleach]

KQEMU has had a FreeBSD port for a long time. There's even an OpenBSD port now.

Where is VMware host support?

[Cthefuture]

VMware is the one application I simply can not do without. Is there anything equivalent for FreeBSD?

I used to run BSD a bit back in the 90's and I have long wanted to run it as my workstation OS, especially now to get ZFS. However, without a good virtualization solution there is no way.

Re:Where is VMware host support?

[TheGratefulNet]

I'm a big freebsd user (not desktop but server). I'm waiting for zfs to become MATURE on the non-sun boxes. from all I've read it is NOT ready for prime time. some really bad memory problems seem to still be there and they are throwing horsepower at it but it sounds like a losing game. its not ready yet (not for my multi TB home video/audio collection!). I do trust raid5 and jfs and that's been doing fine for me but zfs will totally replace that - ONCE it gets ooops-proof on intel/amd and bsd.

not sure if solaris/x86 is more stable for zfs (I would hope so) but freebsd does not seem like its 100% ready for zfs. maybe in a year?

also, I'm seeing poor samba/cifs performance compared to my gentoo linux boxes (both going from an xp box to the back-end server). on linux, my network led lights are solid on and the thruput is fabulous. on bsd, there are more wait-states and lights being off more often than on. not sure what the blocking is (similar hardware on linux and bsd) but bsd has disappointed me big-time the last few years on samba. I won't run it seriously and have had to let my linux box do nfs/samba/raid for me.

linux seems to be overtaking bsd and that's a very sobering thought from a mostly die-hard bsd fan, here.

Re:Where is VMware host support?

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS memory problems are on 32bit architectures. It was developed for 64bit and it needs some room. Some hard limits on 32bit platforms need to be tweaked so it fits. Use a 64bit system with zfs.

Samba is optimized for the linux network stack and you need different options for your FreeBSD6. Seems to work better with FreeBSD7. I d wish the developer wouldnt assume that everything works like on their local linux box.

Re:Where is VMware host support?

[Just Some Guy]

However, without a good virtualization solution there is no way.

This doesn't directly address your problem with VMWare, but FreeBSD's self-virtualization (aka "jails") is outstanding. Our standard deployment now is to build a beefy server with a minimal install, then use jails (via "ezjail") to carve it into multiple production servers. When the system starts to slow, we shuffle the jails around to different hardware as appropriate.

The only thing I dislike about jails today, in practice, is that each can only be assigned one IPv4 address. The new virtualized network stack should allow multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses per jail but it's not available on -STABLE yet. Once that's in place, FreeBSD jails will be the perfect virtual server arrangement for our workload.

Again, that doesn't help you if you're needing to run Windows or Linux VMs (although you can make a jail based on, say, Debian running on the native FreeBSD kernel's emulation layer), but it's extremely useful for consolidating multiple servers onto a machine.

I wonder if the cd installer still sucks

[dtfinch]

This is Disk 1. Please install Disk 2 and select OK to continue.
This is Disk 2. Please install Disk 1 and select OK to continue.
This is Disk 1. Please install Disk 2 and select OK to continue.
This is Disk 2. Please install Disk 1 and select OK to continue.
This is Disk 1. Please install Disk 2 and select OK to continue.
This is Disk 2. Please install Disk 1 and select OK to continue.
* repeat 50+ more times *

Re:I wonder if the cd installer still sucks

[hedwards]

Or you could just try installing a more common set of packages. Or you could just use the DVD release. Or you could always just use ports, packages aren't really meant to be used except in the case of excessively large programs or on boxes without a whole lot of memory or processing power.

I've been using FreeBSD for nearly a decade and I've never encountered that particular problem.

That being said, it's not like Linux installers are that great. The fact that they can't seem to get partitioning correct after all these years ought to be fixed pronto. There's absolutely no excuse as to why the Linux partition manager needs to suck far worse than the Windows one does.

I should be able to clear a partition and then have it automatically sliced up into useful portions without having to boot in the middle of the process. At least with Windows the worst problem is it's pickiness about which partition and it's one size fits all MBR, hardly difficult at all to fix, doesn't even require an extra boot if you're prepared.

Re:I wonder if the cd installer still sucks

[RAMMS EIN]

Ahem. You not having encountered the problem doesn't make the parent's complaint any more or less valid.

Also, your attacks on "Linux installers" are uncalled for and off-topic. We're talking about the FreeBSD CD installer here.

I guess there is a part of your post that is insightful, but most of it is off-topic, and I would have modded it accordingly.

Re:Takes a licking

[larry bagina]

Sometimes it's because you're running critical shit. Sometimes it's because you're running critical shit and the last person with reboot experience retired 10 years ago.

Re:Takes a licking

[ld a,b]

It is supposed to be good for servers, it comes from an age when an uptime of a day was pretty good for a UNIX system(see the unix haters' handbook). Now it is a measure of the amount of widely known security holes the admin is willing to leave open.
Your servers should have an uptime of 365/6 days a year, but that should be achieved by having a redundant array of servers that you update regularly, not by having a single server that you never reboot.

Re:Takes a licking

[Drinking Bleach]

Use CARP and update each server individually. Just because individual hosts go down for a reboot (which should be very quick anyway), doesn't mean your service should.

Re:Get your facts right first.

[kace]

6.4 included official DVD images! (For i386 and amd64.) See the release announcement. You can get them via ftp. Or some torrents are here.
.